


Trajectory

by sixpences



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Manga Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-27
Updated: 2009-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:10:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixpences/pseuds/sixpences
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A responsible soldier takes care to maintain her weapons for optimum performance. Hawkeye at home, shortly after the transfer to Central.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trajectory

In the street below her window there are people walking past, the hazy early sunlight picking out every coloured coat, every different shade of hair. A human being is a predator and the human eye is always drawn to motion, to the telltale movements of prey.

Hawkeye sits at the window with her hair loose around her shoulders, cleaning her guns. The flat still feels like a storehouse, the bare minimum of furniture scattered amongst the boxes, but she's pulled a hard wooden chair up to the window and spread out a cloth and yesterday's newspaper over a makeshift table of cardboard. The smell of the city drifting in on the breeze is almost enough to overcome the smell of oil.

A soldier, she learned very quickly, has simple needs: a weapon, a uniform, and a beating heart. Hell, most of the tins in the little kitchen are dog food, the recipient of which is curled up under the chair, the tip of his softly wagging tail brushing her bare feet. There are still a few things from her parents' crumbling old house packed in one box or another, remnants trailing like a shadow at her feet, but she can't afford to look back now. Focus on the target. She tips her revolver up in her right hand and pushes the bore brush down the barrel. A bullet travels a straight trajectory in the direction it is fired and if it bites through flesh on its way it's no matter.

Sometimes the burn scars on her back itch when she's alone at the shooting range, or late at night when she's staring at the ceiling wide-awake. They shatter the array and blot out the most crucial things her father entrusted to her skin, but she's told almost every man she's ever taken to her bed that she prefers the dark just to keep them from seeing, to preserve some idea of Riza Hawkeye that isn't still trapped inside her father's strange geometry.

The sitting room had been full of light the first time the Colonel touched her, when he was still just Roy and both of them believed that dreams were simple things.

He had stayed four days after the funeral and she had drawn the curtains and lit the old gas lamps and lain like an artist's model as he traced his warm fingers across her back and scribbled furiously in his little black notebook. She had never seen the tattoo properly, even craning her head in front of a mirror, but he described it to her in rapt tones, followed the needle's track with hands and words. She had studied precisely enough alchemy to learn that she had no aptitude for it but Roy's wonder could almost make her see it, the shifting of atoms, the world remaking itself around human hands.

On the fourth day he slid those hands around her waist and mumbled, "You know I can't stay," and she heard but I want to like cryptic symbols around the edge. His breath stirred the shortest hairs at the nape of her neck.

She rolled over to look him in the eye. "Just stay one more night."

Looking at him every day she still remembers the way his lower lip trembled, the pads of her thumbs against the sharp edges of his hipbones, though Colonel Mustang is a different person to the boy with the tattered black notebook and the warm, tentative hands.

Hawkeye pushes the brush into the cylinders, three, four, five, six. A bullet only ever travels in a single direction. She's written her own burdens into her skin now, ones that can never be burned away, death in every line of her palm and the crease at her knuckle where her finger sits against the trigger. She wears the smell of gunpowder like other women wear cheap scent.

Underneath the chair Black Hayate makes a chuffing noise as he stands up and noses his way out between her feet. He'll need walking before she goes into the office later in the morning, unless she can bring him with her and persuade Fuery to take him around the parade ground. In the unfamiliar streets of Central she keeps him on a shorter leash, tugging him away from alleys and shop fronts and the long shadows the high buildings leave. He beats his tail companionably against her leg as he wanders over to his half-finished breakfast, and she clicks the cylinder back into place and sets the revolver down on the other side of the box. Her Karabiner is propped carefully against the wall and she picks it up and slides the bolt out.

In the capital she feels as if danger is somehow closer by, brushing against the fine hairs on her skin. It's a far cry from the singed, bloody air of Ishval where she was either tense and ready to fire or fast asleep from exhaustion; instead the city creeps around the edges of her vision, never presenting a clear target. She's been more worried about the Colonel since they transferred and tries to tell herself it's irrational, worries again that that's as much a lie as telling herself this is only a job.

The weight of the rifle across her knees is solid and comforting, clean lines of metal and dark, smooth-grained wood. The first time she ever took apart a gun it had seemed unduly complicated but she understands the mechanisms now, every spring and lever honed to its simple purpose making up the whole. A fly buzzes across the room and Hayate barks after it. The sun is slowly climbing the horizon.

In a few hours she will go into headquarters and all six of them will spend the day risking paper cuts for their country, except when Havoc wanders outside for a cigarette and Breda goes for pie and the Colonel sneaks a dusty old book out from his desk drawer and she glances up to see his pale fingers against the dark leather of the cover like an afterimage. The brush turns in a helix down the rifle's barrel ahead of her hand.

She has put the past behind her and it has stayed there, itching between her shoulder blades, just out of sight in the mirror.

When she walks into the office Breda is showing Fuery how to fold a crane out of paper and the Colonel's desk is in its usual disarray as he scrabbles in a drawer for his fountain pen. She reaches out to catch a toppling pile of assessment forms as she passes and he looks up and catches her eye. Like every morning the corner of his mouth twitches into a little smile, one she never sees elsewhere. His smile doesn't ever change.

The pistol at her hip is a steady counterweight as she walks past him to her desk, the sunlight falling down, down through the high window and across the floor at her feet.


End file.
